Frank Lucas Favors Short Term Thinking for Oklahoma
Oklahoma Republican Frank Lucas tries to explain why he is against any regulatory effort to reduce greenhouse gases:
They go about that by increasing taxes on all forms of energy, and agriculture is a very energy-intense business, whether it is the diesel for the tractors to put the crop in the ground, the energy to make the seed, to prepare the seeds I should say, to produce the fertilizers, the petrochemicals, the energy required in the form of diesel to harvest, to transport, to process, to put in the grocery store shelf, to keep it cool and fresh for consumers. We’re energy intensive. So if you dramatically increase the cost of farming and ranching, and farmers are, er, price takers not price makers, we’ll bear the blunt of that. And ultimately the consumers will pay higher prices just as farmers’ income goes down also.
Lucas’ concern is short term, about decreasing profit for farmers due to increases in the cost of farming and ranching, assuming that farming technology will not respond to the incentive for increased efficiency by becoming more efficient. But he ignores the larger picture. What happens if global warming is allowed to proceed as greenhouse gases skyrocket? What happens to Oklahoma? According to Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science the future will look like this:
With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the south-west is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle.
Severe drought in Oklahoma. How efficient was farming in Oklahoma during the last severe drought?
(Source: Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division)
One would hope that Frank Lucas puts his eye on long-term prospects for Oklahoma farming when he considers the environment. One would hope.
